flipper/docs/getting-started/android-native.md

id, title, sidebar_label

id	title	sidebar_label
android-native	Set up your Android app	Android

To set up Flipper for Android, you need to add the neccessary dependencies to your app, initialize the Flipper client and enable the plugins you want to use. Optionally, you can hook up the diagnostics Activity to help you troubleshoot connection issues.

Dependencies

Flipper is distributed via JCenter. Add the dependencies to your build.gradle file. You should also explicitly depend on soloader instead of relying on transitive dependency resolution which is getting deprecated with Gradle 5.

We provide a "no-op" implementation of some oft-used Flipper interfaces you can use to make it easier to strip Flipper from your release builds.

repositories {
  jcenter()
}

dependencies {
  debugImplementation 'com.facebook.flipper:flipper:0.35.0'
  debugImplementation 'com.facebook.soloader:soloader:0.8.2'

  releaseImplementation 'com.facebook.flipper:flipper-noop:0.35.0'
}

Please note that our flipper-noop package provides a limited subset of the APIs provided by the flipper package and does not provide any plugin stubs. It is recommended that you keep all Flipper instantiation code in a separate build variant to ensure it doesn't accidentally make it into your production builds. Check out the sample app to see how to organise your Flipper initialization into debug and release variants.

Alternatively, have a look at the third-party flipper-android-no-op repository, which provides empty implementations for several Flipper plugins.

Application Setup

Now you can initialize Flipper in your Application's onCreate method, which involves initializing SoLoader (for loading the C++ part of Flipper) and starting a FlipperClient.

import com.facebook.flipper.android.AndroidFlipperClient;
import com.facebook.flipper.android.utils.FlipperUtils;
import com.facebook.flipper.core.FlipperClient;
import com.facebook.flipper.plugins.inspector.DescriptorMapping;
import com.facebook.flipper.plugins.inspector.InspectorFlipperPlugin;


public class MyApplication extends Application {

  @Override
  public void onCreate() {
    super.onCreate();
    SoLoader.init(this, false);

    if (BuildConfig.DEBUG && FlipperUtils.shouldEnableFlipper(this)) {
      final FlipperClient client = AndroidFlipperClient.getInstance(this);
      client.addPlugin(new InspectorFlipperPlugin(this, DescriptorMapping.withDefaults()));
      client.start();
    }
  }
}

Diagnostics

It's recommended that you add the following activity to the manifest, which can help diagnose integration issues and other problems:

<activity android:name="com.facebook.flipper.android.diagnostics.FlipperDiagnosticActivity"
        android:exported="true"/>

Android Snapshots

Feeling adventurous? We publish Android snapshot releases directly off of master.

You can get the latest version by adding the Maven Snapshot repository to your sources and pointing to the most recent -SNAPSHOT version.

repositories {
  maven { url 'https://oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/snapshots/' }
}

dependencies {
  debugImplementation 'com.facebook.flipper:flipper:0.35.1-SNAPSHOT'
  debugImplementation 'com.facebook.soloader:soloader:0.8.2'

  releaseImplementation 'com.facebook.flipper:flipper-noop:0.35.1-SNAPSHOT'
}

Enabling plugins

Finally, you need to add plugins to your Flipper client. Above, we have only added the Layout Inspector plugin to get you started. See Network Plugin and Layout Inspector Plugin for information on how to add them, and also enable Litho or ComponentKit support. You can check the sample apps in the GitHub repo for examples of integrating other plugins.

Having trouble?

See the troubleshooting page for help with known problems.